Which means, “This is a nightmare I’m going to wake up out of, and Ryan will still be here.” Don’t be shocked at that. None of us are prepared to entertain the thought, “it never happened” for very long. You’ve thought it, now feel it. Nobody knows how long each Stop lasts.

Maybe, for some of us, the rest of our life.

For instance, we build a home at the next Stop(the Anger Stop) because we ’re still mad at God, or someone else.

Of course, we are!

Don’t deny your anger!

Feel it…

The church often tells those of us in grief, “don’t be mad at God!”

I say, “Be as mad as you need to be. God can take it.”

So, spend as much time as you need there.

You might even find you need to return to this Stop again and again.

It’s OK. You’re the engineer.

There will always be the opportunity to move forward or return to this Stop.

God built that into our Journey together.

So maybe you’ve left the Anger Stop for now, and Depression has set in. (Mine lasted twelve years.)

When I was a little girl, there was a miniature train at the park. And you would board the train and it might have a Putt-Putt Golf Stop, a Botanical Garden Stop, or a Horseback Riding Stop where you can get off for a while.

Now I’m building my own railroad, with a miniature train called “The Grief Train.” And every Stop comes from the ride of my own life.

Here are the Stops this train will make:

Denial

Anger

Depression

Survival

Acceptance (You will notice I never get to the “Acceptance” Stop.)

I can’t.

I cannot accept Ryan’s death. But that’s just me.

On this train, I won’t suggest you stay on it all the way till the end, without getting off, like well-meaning church people tend to. I will encourage you to get off at every Stop, for however long you need to, including the ones you don’t want to get off at.

None of the Stops should be confused with your ultimate Destination. But they can be.

It’s your train too if you’re up for the ride.

God might suggest we make every Stop because God is all about learning, and the way we learn is to go thru every Stop of the learning process.

Stop, unboard the train, listen and learn what’s there, embrace it as best you can, and move on whenever you’re ready. No shortcuts.

This is not microwavable.

That’s not how God ‘bakes’ a person. We’re more like God’s personal crock pot. Low heat, all day long unlike American gods (money, power).

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A major turning point for me came when I tied together the way Tyler held out his hands to me and the way Jesus held out his hands to his friends.

Focus on those hands for a minute. See the holes in his hands and remember the giant hole in his side from a well-aimed Roman spear? There’s nothing he could do to make the scars go away because, just like ours, his scars are permanent.

Think about the way he honored his scars.

I’m thinking about “Doubting Thomas.” He told them that he would not believe unless he saw and touched the scars. Because somehow Jesus’ scars are at the Center of his life story.

And my scars are the Center of my life story and I can’t get away from them. I don’t need to tell you that people do not want to look at our scars. And they even encourage us sometimes to hide them, as if Jesus wore gloves for the rest of his natural life.

Jesus had scars like ours: Physical scars. Emotional scars. Mental scars. His scars were the proof of his single-minded Love for the whole world.

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Besides offering a funny face when I was so grief-stricken, my 2-year-old son, Tyler, gave me another gift that turned out to be the Best Gift I’ve ever received in my life.

And he gave it to me every morning of every month after “the accident.” (That’s my baby boy!)

What he gave me was a new way of looking at myself and life. He saw beyond my pain. He saw beneath my scars. He saw the heart of a mother in the chest of someone who didn’t deserve to be called a mother anymore. For him, nothing had changed. Nothing. Because every time he pushed my door open, he saw the one thing he needed most; his mommy. He saw me as a fountain–everything he needed.

Tyler

I saw my failure at the ‘scene,’ he didn’t. I was more than the scars that came from the scene, he taught me that, and he hardly knew how to talk. He knew me ‘by heart’ not words. I was his mother, not the ‘scarred’ mother, but the mother who knew exactly what he needed, and when.

He showed me that I still had the Goods. He never bailed on me once while I was bailing on me every day.

How can a 2-year-old do that?

I think about the Little Prince and what he said, “ It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

Tyler saw me rightly and I became his vision of me.

He took me by the hand into the kitchen for breakfast.

He led me to the window to show me, in a loving way, that Life goes on.

me and tyler

It didn’t matter to him if I was ready to see it or not; it’s what he saw in me. It’s the Best Gift anyone has ever given me.

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Take a look at these hands. They could be the hands of your mother. Hands that carried you, changed you and nurtured you. These are hands that have been lovingly lived in. If you look carefully at them, they look like a MAP. With veins like highways and age spots like Scars collected along the way. Hands that have been somewhere and I don’t mean on vacation.

Don’t be taken in by that silly commercial.

The one where a mom and daughter are holding out their hands while the “hypster” asks us if we can tell which is the mother and which is the daughter.

And their point is you shouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

I say that if you’ve completely invested yourself in the life of your family, your hands will tell the truth about you. If you’re a mother, your hands will tell a hundred or more stories.

They get cut and bruised. Scarred. The idea that a mother’s hands should look as young as a daughter’s hands is crazy-sad. In the name of beauty, we try to erase the wear and tear of a person’s body as they grow older. I get that.

Ry and me

But when I look at my hands, I see the evidence of the sacrifices I’ve made, and my Scars are somehow transformed into Badges of Love.

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I mentioned last time that I am beginning to find the beauty in my scars and to honor that beauty. It’s easy to say, but it’s taken me 17 years (one day at a time) to get to where I can even talk to you about it today.

I showed you what the fire did to my legs. That scarring has been hard enough to deal with.

But there’s another scar deeper than the scars on my legs, it’s the scar behind any scar on my body.

It’s the scar that won’t heal, that chases me wherever I go.

It’s the scar way deeper than any scar you can see with the naked eye.

It is the scar that Ryan’s death left on my heart.

I see the scars on my legs every day but they always lead me back to Ryan’s face.

Ryan

I WILL NEVER OVERCOME THAT! How can a mother overcome the death of her child? She can’t.

Let’s say God came to me during the first days of my loss and said, “Dawn, I have good news and bad news for you, which do you want first?”

And I say, “Lord, give me the bad news first.”

And God says, “ It’s gonna take you 17 years to really begin to see the Light.”

And I say, “ I can’t make it 17 years, not 7 years, not 7 hours.”

And God says, “ But that’s exactly where the good news comes in. You’re gonna make it. You’ re not going to kill yourself. We’re gonna go thru it together. And you’ll come out on the other side a stronger person, with a Mission the size of which you can’t comprehend right now.”

To you, friend, I’m going to say the same thing to you that God said to me, “ We are going to get thru this together.”

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When I was 19, I was backpacking Europe and by the time I got to Munich I was about out of money. So, I started modeling again. Mostly lingerie and bathing suit jobs. Check out the photographs. (Here’s a magazine cover.) It appears that I was scar-less but don’t be fooled; I had plenty of scars that nobody could see. I even hid them from myself.

Modeling is about perfection. And scars are the enemies of perfection. You know our universal dis-ease is perfectionism. Look at the world of plastic surgery: $16 billion was spent last year, all because we can not accept our imperfections, our SCARS. And we’ll do anything to appear pristine. But in the back of our mind, we know everybody has scars. Noone is unmarked.

About my scars from the fire… God didn’t create the fire or the scars from the fire. But God did show me the beauty of them. I’m beginning to honor them and I challenge you to do the same. Your scars are beautifully You.